Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ Category

Nicholas Guan did an interisting test on the popularity of Facebook compared to other market leading SNS in Asia. He based the popularity on the amount of times the SNS were searched for in Google. As Nicholas mentions this could possibly result in a less representative outcome since not Google but Baidu is market leader in China.

There are several spikes in the graph of Facebook users in China. Especially at the end of May there seems to be a sudden interest in Facebook. Also at the end of June of this year it seemed that Facebook was catching up fast during that time. It would be interesting to do a more thorough research on this while taking the popularity of the search engines in a country into account.

Furthermore according to the graph Xiaonei is becoming less popular. So according to this graph it would mean that Chinese netizens are losing interest in both SNS Facebook and Xiaonei! Is there another Chinese SNS that is growing in popularity (51.com, QZone?) or is Social Networking in general becoming oldfashioned in China?

I wonder how much these numbers are influenced by the differences in Baidu and Google users. Are Chinese netizens that use Google instead of Baidu different than their Baidu counterparts? A hypothesis could be that Chinese Google users are more experienced compared to Baidu users, Chinese Googlers use their Internet more for information rather than entertainment? Anyhow, you can find the full Asia SN popularity test here.